Stroad
[1][2][3][4] Common in the United States and Canada, stroads are wide arterials (as roads for through traffic) that often provide access to strip malls, drive-throughs, and other automobile-oriented businesses (as streets do).
[4][9][10] According to Charles Marohn, a stroad is a bad combination of two types of vehicular pathways: it is part street—which he describes as a "complex environment where life in the city happens", with pedestrians, cars, buildings close to the sidewalk for easy accessibility, with many (property) entrances / exits to and from the street, and with spaces for temporary parking and delivery vehicles—and part road, which he describes as a "high-speed connection between two places" with wide lanes and limited entrances and exits, and which are generally straight or have gentle curves.
[16] The concept of the stroad was popularized in large part as a result of an April 2021 short documentary by the Canadian-born Amsterdam-based Jason Slaughter of the urban planning YouTube channel Not Just Bikes, which went viral, and[11][17]: 1:02 stated that stroads in North America are "ugly, dangerous, and inefficient", as well as more expensive, contrasting them with road design in the Netherlands, where clear functional distinctions between motorways (highways), roads, and streets were introduced in the 1990s.
[20][18] The redesigning of roads in the Netherlands into these three functions, as part of the Dutch Sustainable Safety Vision, resulted in a 30% decrease in expected traffic deaths between 1998 and 2007.
[21] Zurborg argued that stroads in the United States are the result of local governments designing their roadways to fulfill all three functions simultaneously, thus leading to numerous problems.
[26] In some cases, roads become stroads due to a lack of access management implementation when facilities are expanded or widened, often with the aim of improving mobility.
A wide buffer of trees existed on either side of the road area, separating the roadway from slip lanes for slow-driving traffic.
[28][10]: 12:01 The Esplanade in Chico, California is, according to Marohn, a rare example of a successful 'stroad' akin to the 2001 version of the Parisian Champs-Élysées in that buffers of trees physically separate the high-speed 'road' part in the middle from the two low-speed productive 'streets' on the sides (lined by houses which had high property values).
[29] Unlike Marohn, however, Jason Slaughter of Not Just Bikes does not categorize such traffic situations as a "stroad", but as "a road with streets on either side to access houses".
[33] Vision Zero Coalition's 2018 report explained that since the stroad has a false sense of safety, drivers subconsciously drive at dangerously fast speeds.
Roads and streets that use traffic calming use physical and perceptual cues to subconsciously trigger drivers to drive slower and more cautiously due to perceived danger.
[37] The typical lack of these cues on stroads causes motorists to drive much faster than is safe to do in the environment they are in, with many entries and exits creating points of conflict and potential collisions, especially at higher speeds.
[41] This partial success motivated Bostonian locals to demand the complete elimination of the remaining stroads by implementing better road design.
[14] Whereas stroads often feature a repetitive pattern of retail franchises on the side with very few sidewalks for pedestrians, there are usually large parking spaces for drivers.
[44] The stroad can be found where urban sprawl and car-centric development patterns are used: it 'seems confused', and is characterized by 'no sidewalk, no shade, and a lot of parking'.
'[44] Walking for a distance of 800 metres (2,600 ft) along a stroad (Farm to Market Road 1960 or Cypress Creek Parkway) in Houston was what motivated Jason Slaughter of Not Just Bikes to wonder who could have possibly designed such a situation, and how urban planning could be done much safer and more efficiently (by improving walkability and reducing car dependency).
Conversion to a street would involve slowing traffic, prioritizing people over cars, and encouraging complex community interactions and solution.
